MASE Program's Payoff Is Livelier Math Lessons

Over the buzz of excited voices and the distinctive clatter of dice
on nearby tables, Jamie Cortez mutters a time-honored invocation before
rolling his "bones.''

"Daddy needs a new pair of shoes,'' he says with a grin.

When the first die tumbles to a halt, he notes his score and draws a
matching number of circles on a piece of paper.

Then he rolls again, notes his score, and sketches stars within each
circle corresponding to the dots on the face of the die.

His opponent, meanwhile, glumly suggests that she is fated to roll
lower numbers than Mr. Cortez.

At first glance, the game seems less like a professional-development
seminar for teachers than something akin to the action taking place not
far away in the casinos that line the Las Vegas strip.

But Mr. Cortez and the other teachers of the Clark County school
district's Mathematics and Science Enhancement (MASE) program, gathered
here at the Kirk L. Adams Elementary School, are playing for very
different stakes.

Unlike the city's "high rollers,'' they expect their big payoff to
come over time, as they learn to help their peers develop the
mathematical acumen needed to replace rote arithmetic lessons with a
rich math pedagogy.

This morning's lesson, for example, is designed to illustrate how
the seemingly simple game of "circles and stars'' can be the starting
point for lessons in addition, multiplication, probability, and pattern
recognition.

Proponents say MASE seems to be generating, often for the first
time, excitement among elementary teachers about teaching math.

"I just came out of the university and, basically, the university
showed me what could be possible, but not how to do it,'' Mr. Cortez
says. "So when a slot opened up for our school [in the MASE program], I
thought, 'What an opportunity to learn what I didn't learn.'''

If successful here in the nation's ninth-largest district, the MASE
approach to staff development could have important implications for
reform in other large urban areas.

'Constructivist' Learning

MASE is an ambitious multiyear effort designed to produce two groups
of mathematically and scientifically adept teachers, according to Linda
Gregg, the MASE program coordinator.

The first, a group of 70 "teacher leaders,'' will eventually
shoulder the responsibility for introducing new ways of teaching math
to teachers in the district's 127 elementary schools. A second group of
site-based teachers will work with their colleagues at each school to
help implement the program.

Before that work can begin, however, the prospective teacher-leaders
will have spent at least two years attending hands-on workshops to
learn the techniques of effective math instruction.

Although MASE is designed to improve the quality of both math and
science instruction in grades K-6, staff development in science has
lagged behind the math program.

In math, MASE is designed to help teachers apply the curriculum and
teaching standards developed by the National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics, which favor teaching critical thinking over rote
computation.

It also builds on a "constructivist'' model of learning, which holds
that students come to the classroom with a host of personal experiences
that help shape their learning and the ways in which they make sense of
information. (See Education Week, Oct. 9, 1991.)

In the constructivist model, teachers act more as guides to help
children build their understanding than as traditional dispensers of
knowledge.

"A lot of children come to us without having an opportunity to
think,'' Ruth Parker, an independent consultant to the MASE program,
tells teachers of grades 3-6 during one workshop. "What we're trying to
do is build a memory bank [from which] the child can draw to solve
problems.''

Rocked Out of the Old Ways

But the MASE program also emphasizes that teachers must not only
abandon their traditional classroom techniques, but also must be
offered the chance to learn the math they need in ways that amplify the
constructivist model.

Hence, the staff-development workshops concentrate on hands-on
lessons in exercises like "circles and stars.''

Ms. Parker often teaches model lessons during staff-development
sessions to allow teachers to observe and learn from her mistakes.

"It's really risky [to teach a lesson] in front of 40 kids that
you've never given before,'' Ms. Gregg remarks.

Under the MASE structure, the teacher-leaders will each be assigned
to a group of schools to conduct in-service training.

"By design, we won't have leaders in-service their own school,'' Ms.
Parker notes."Their job is to rock people out of their old ways of
doing things, and that's terribly difficult to do with their own peers
within the school.''

MASE also is designed to train a group of "site
specialists''--teachers who will act as school-based liaisons between
the teacher-leaders and their classroom colleagues, helping to ease the
transition to new ways of teaching.

Another unusual feature of the program is that principals also have
been invited to attend the staff-development sessions.

'101 Reasons Not To Change'

Before the district launched MASE, Clark County's approach to
elementary math and science differed little from the national norm, Ms.
Gregg observes. Elementary teachers focused heavily on simple
arithmetic, and, if they taught science at all, generally read from a
textbook.

Although the district's staff-development programs in math and
science frequently received federal funding, they produced "pretty
sporadic'' results, Ms. Gregg says.

"The idea came to me that in a [145,000-student] district, we did
not have enough teachers that were able to give leadership,'' she
says.

As an alternative, Ms. Gregg and others designed the MASE approach
and applied for funding from the National Science Foundation's
teacher-enhancement program.

The foundation agreed in 1992 to support the four-year project, and
the district began its first training sessions shortly afterward.

But while many teachers seem enthusiastic about the new approach,
acceptance of the constructivist philosophy of the program is hardly
universal.

Ms. Gregg discussed some of the lessons learned from the first full
year of the MASE program at a meeting of urban districts committed to
elementary math and science reform held in Inverness, Calif., last
month. (See story, this page.)

While many prospective teacher-leaders are embracing change, she
noted in a briefing paper that others "are finding 101 reasons not to
change anything.''

MASE is also designed to fill a need for competent math teachers in
the early grades that is being exacerbated by the district's ballooning
enrollment.

Clark County officials estimate that the district will have to build
roughly 100 new schools by 2000.

The goal of the MASE program is to insure that even if new teachers
come to the district with minimal math skills, an organizational
structure will be in place to help them learn both math content and
successful pedagogy.

That aspect of the program could also have important national
applications, because most districts lack any comprehensive means of
upgrading teacher skills.

A number of critical reports have decried the level of math training
required of most prospective elementary teachers. Experts contend that
the generally weak math backgrounds of elementary teachers have hurt
the math education given to most students.

'Circular Problem'

An article in the January issue of the The American Mathematical
Monthly, a publication of the Mathematical Association of America,
argues that the solution to improving the math ability of elementary
teachers lies in changing the attitudes of college professors toward
teaching basic math to students who are not majoring in the
subject.

In the article, titled "Future Elementary Teachers: The Neglected
Constituency,'' Thomas W. Hungerford, a math professor at Cleveland
State University, argues that the current difficulty in math education
is a "circular problem,'' in which college professors criticize the
weak math backgrounds of their students without recognizing that they
are in large measure responsible for producing poorly educated
teachers.

"Considering what is being done to improve other [math] courses, the
lack of attention being paid to courses for prospective elementary
teachers is astounding,'' Mr. Hungerford asserts.

But Ms. Gregg and Ms. Parker maintain that much work also needs to
be done to help teachers already in the field.

"[Teachers have] learned, through school, that [math is] a horrible
subject and they hate it,'' Ms. Gregg says. "Through MASE, they're
learning a lot of the mathematics themselves that they never learned
before.''

Mr. Cortez concedes that his math education ended in high school,
and that he never really grasped the importance of math in everyday
life.

But his work in the MASE program, he says, has caused him to abandon
his "by the book'' approach to math teaching.

"My students ask for math now,'' he says. "And I enjoy teaching
it.''

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